I've been a very long time user of MythTV and I can't imagine life without it. I'm not a programmer and haven't been able to contribute in any meaningful way, for which I'm feeling pretty guilty. Around this time of year I make a modest monetary donation to an organization I like and this year I would really like to donate to MythTV.

I don't remember seeing any "Donate to this project" buttons or posts anywhere so I have a few questions.
1. How can I donate some leafy greeny cashy monies, fundages and such, to the MythTV project?
2. Are such donations accepted? Can they help the project? I imagine that money is needed to feed programmers, pay for services like GIT or to buy equipment for testing, but I just don't recall seeing any requests for help, at least not lately, maybe ten years ago I saw something.

Anywho, thanks a giant metric ton to everyone who helps keep this incredible program working! Please let me show my appreciation by donating.

I have donated to MythTV in the past. What I have done is seen who has been active in submitting commits and then contacted the dev concerned and offeried a donation direct. Some have accepted, some have not and joining Paypal was a reason for refusing.

Donations for servers etc. would be welcomed I assume but there does not seem to be an easy way, such as a donate button, to allow for that.

I was searching to see if MythTV had a way to donate to help fund the development, but all I found was this forum thread, so I am posting a reply to raise this question again in the forum. The idea of donating hardware, such as new tuners to test, sounds great in theory, except that the person donating and the developer testing the hardware would have to be in the same country in most cases since our hardware is different. Similarly it is not simple to set up a central fund where users could donate money and have it then distributed to the developers, since whoever received and distributed the funds might have income tax problems with the funds.

Steve's suggestion is good, except those of us who don't have the time or skills to contribute directly to the development, documentation, etc. aren't likely to spend much time trying to decide who is doing what to improve and support MythTV. A simple solution might be to have a sub-forum regarding donations. People working on MythTV could post a message saying what they do for the project if they would like to receive donations and why. The why could be "need to buy a XXX tuner for testing", "some extra money for my coding efforts would give me more time to code on YYY feature rather than getting a second job", etc. The forum moderators, like Steve could vet the posts for us and delete ones ones that were bogus from people that were not contributors to MythTV.

We as users who want to donate could then pick one we wanted to support and send them a private message for info on how to donate to them. If it was cash, they could send info for PayPal or other services. If they needed hardware and were in the same country, then the person wishing to donate could buy the hardware online and have it shipped to the person.

MythTV, like most other such Open Source software, has a major problem with documentation lagging behind development, so users must try to use documentation for V25 when trying to fix a problem with V29, and this is an area beside programming where donations might motivate more people to contribute. While people working on projects such as MythTV don't do it for the money, money can sometimes help solve other problems in life that prevent them from doing play-work on a project like this. Getting a donation occasionally that would pay to take one's spouse or significant other out for a nice dinner out, could also help the person avoid unpleasant conversations such as "Why do you spend so much time with that project and ignore me, the kids, etc."

I will promise $50 US via PayPal to the first 3 valid requests for donations along with whoever (Steve maybe?) sets up a donations sub-forum and moderates it.

Same here. Although I fiddled around countless hours to get it working everytime from analogue Hauppauge PVR to digital technotrend ct2-4400 and ct2-4650, from mythbuntu to ubuntu and back ;- ) Although not everything is perfect but It is always a pleasure to enjoy it when it works! Thanks to all developers and contributers!